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Description: A synthetic narcotic, fentanyl has been detected in an increasing number of illicit drug overdose deaths in Metro Vancouver. Many of the people who died were recreational and/or occasional users and don’t appear to have known they were ingesting fentanyl, as it is easily hidden in other drugs.

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LINZ, Austria: White swans on the "Blue" Danube: In a way, those six words summed up what it felt like to cruise along the second-longest river in Europe. When I asked a fellow traveller what he thought of the cruise, New York’' Norman said: "I took a book up on the sundeck every day, but I never read a page. There was just always so much to see."

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MELBOURNE, Australia — Roger Federer is out of the Australian Open in the third round, beaten by Italian Andreas Seppi 6-4, 7-6 (5), 4-6, 7-6 (5) on Friday. Federer was trying to come from two sets down for the 10th […]

After completing my cycling trip from Vancouver down the Pacific Coast to Mexico, crossing the southern USA to the Atlantic Ocean in Florida I planned to cross Europe on my way around the world. I was excited to find that some of the most famous cycling routes were off-road paved paths that for the most part followed rivers.

Let's get one thing straight: When it comes to Transylvania, it's not all about vampires and the Prince of Darkness. Sure, it's home to spooky-looking, precipitous castles that are Gothic enough to curdle the blood of myriad Bram Stoker fans and rammed with nods to Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century real-life Dracula inspiration.

Seventy-five years ago, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin shocked the world by signing a “non-aggression pact” with Nazi Germany. The agreement was previously believed unthinkable, given that the Soviet Union was Communist and Germany was fascist. German dictator Adolf Hitler had been throwing German Communists into concentration camps for years; many German leftists had fled to Russia to escape persecution.

A little more than 100 years ago, the first shells of the First World War began to fall on the neighbourhoods around Serbia’s Danube and Sava rivers. Dusan Ðonovic, a 16-year-old Serbian Army volunteer, became the first victim of that war. The last victim was a Canadian, George Lawrence Price. The 26-year-old from Falmouth, N.S., was fatally shot by a German sniper at 10:58 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918, in Belgium. He died just two minutes before the armistice ceasefire that ended the war began at 11 a.m.

If they were thirsty and hungry enough, Peter and Leonie Mahony and their 11 adult children might keep a rural Irish pub in business. That certainly wouldn’t be so the case of the Vancouver locales that Chris, Gerard, Mike, Paddy and Peter Mahony operate under the name Mahony & Sons. Their first pub, which opened at UBC in 2006, seats 300.Five years later, a 7,700-square-foot successor was established on the Coal Harbour waterfront with room for 450.

Opodo.co.uk, an online travel retailer, recently revealed some of the most hilarious and outrageous requests it's gotten from customers. Somebody called up pretending to be the Queen of England and demanded a free first-class holiday in Australia, claiming that anyone who refused her would be jailed for treason.

Rita Akselrod was six years old when she first felt the sharp sting of anti-Semitism. It happened when she was in Grade 1 in her hometown in Romania. With all the neighbourhood children her age going to school, she thought she should go, too. Her mother had to fight to get her in.

When the Blue Man Group wanted to sign a 10-year lease to use Alex Beim’s whimsical invention in their theatrical shows — one or two shows per location, eight locations worldwide, 364 days a year — the Vancouver man hesitated. “I was too nervous. I wasn’t sure,” said Beim, whose fledgling company, Tangible Interaction, had just one other employee at the time. “It was a big deal to get approached by a large company like that to use something that I made.”

For nearly five years, Sunshine coast resident Victoria Maxwell denied she had a mental illness, even though she had been hospitalized after running naked through Point Grey while experiencing psychosis. There was the stigma and shame, but she was also worried that any medication doctors might prescribe would rob her of artistic energy.

Despite what proponents of legalizing prostitution may want people to believe, Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada ruling on prostitution is no great victory. The unanimous decision did strike down legal prohibitions on running brothels, living off the avails of prostitution, and communicating for the purposes of prostitution. The justices did agree that those laws put the safety and lives of prostitutes at risk, which is unconstitutional.